Okay, let\'s see if we can get this thread resurrected! I\'d really love to see other folks\' work and hear the stories behind the images. Don\'t hold back, show us the final images, setup images, tell us how you got there!
Here\'s one from me from this week.
Monday I had what might have been my worst shoot ever (even trumping a few weeks ago when a Profoto Acute2 pack blew up 10 shots into a shoot!) with the worst makeup artist I\'ve ever worked with. All of my regular folks were booked or unavailable, so I ended up working with someone for the first time - big mistake. It was absolutely painful and mortifying and required multiple phone calls and meetings to apologize to the agency bookers who repped the models in question. I kicked the makeup artist off the shoot and walked her out of the studio mid-afternoon, scrapping half the day\'s planned setups and leaving one model totally unshot. So, to make up for it (no pun intended), I brought her back on Wednesday to work with one of my regular makeup artists.
Rather than trying to cram a bunch of fashion looks into a casual shoot we opted to do two simple beauty setups instead - one light and one dark, with the idea that they could make facing pages in a portfolio or a diptych. We shot the light look first, with really clean \"nude\" makeup (always shoot the clean look first!), then moved on to the darker \"evening\" look.
Basically, you\'ve got three strobe heads on separate packs, two gelled and one gridded, plus a reflector to bounce a little fill back in. The intent was for either one or both of the gelled heads to be in the frame, depending on composition. The red gelled head went in first, then the blue, then the gridded \"key light\" and reflector last. While initially lighting it felt like f/11 was going to be an output sweet spot, so I continued to light for that after the first head was up.
From shot to shot we made small adjustments, applying more gloss to Sam\'s lips or product in her hair or spraying water across her chest and shoulders to get a slightly different look.
This is what one of the shots looked like - this is unretouched, right out of camera except for cropping. The final image will get a fair amount of retouching, as most beauty images do.
Total time for this setup was probably: 35 minutes for makeup (built over an earlier makeup look), 25 minutes to build and tweak the lighting, 10-15 minutes of makeup tweaking once under light, 10 minutes of lighting tweaking while shooting, 15 minutes of total shooting. I shot 104 total frames of this look and it was the second of two looks we shot with this model - both looks took 2.5 hours to shoot, including setup and cleanup.
Aug 23, 2009 at 10:22 AM
Previous versions of shatterkiss's message #7445477 « Show us your setup! »
